Dr. John Bruchalski
would rather close the doors to his medical practice than violate his
conscience.

That’s what he said in a recent
interview as the Obama administration was considering rescinding a Bush
administration rule on protecting the consciences of physicians who refuse to
perform abortions and prescribe contraceptives.

It would have been a blacker day if
Bruchalski’s father could have peered into the future just 15 years: His son
would become an obstetrician-gynecologist providing the full array of
contraceptive services, including sterilizations and abortions.

“I believed that I was giving my
patients the possibility of greater happiness and better partner relationships
along with permanence and exclusivity,” he explains.

Belief bumped against reality. Women
kept returning with worrisome pelvic infections, ectopic pregnancies, venereal
diseases, including AIDS (two dying from it), not to mention the heartache of
broken relationships and the attendant depression.

Bruchalski is the founder of
Fairfax, Va.’s Tepeyac Family Center, a nonprofit obstetrics and gynecology
practice that provides state-of-the-art care to women with and without medical
insurance. It is part of the Divine Mercy Care nonprofit health-care
organization.

Register correspondent Nona Aguilar
spoke to Bruchalski about his transformation to the committed pro-life
obstetrician-gynecologist that he is today.

You grew up in a Catholic home,
praying a daily Rosary, attending Mass at least weekly, and you were also an
altar boy attending daily Mass. And yet you performed abortions. How did that
happen?

I think I can summarize the reasons
in two ways. First, a good Catholic upbringing is not sufficient. In addition,
I didn’t have a good Catholic education.

Through all those years of Catholic
“education,” I never understood my faith as I do now: as something that you
bring into your heart so that you have a personal relationship
with the living presence of the crucified and resurrected Jesus Christ.
Instead, it was just a subject for study.

I learned about world religions,
trying to understand Eastern religions in particular; the dissenting positions
on Catholic Church teachings; situational ethics — I don’t recall that any of
the insight or understanding of St. Thomas was ever brought to the fore; and
new approaches to “understanding” Christ’s miracles as psychological
manifestations felt by the crowds, not as true miracles.

I will also add this: I learned
about the primacy of conscience. I left school believing that whatever I might
consider doing was fine if my conscience was okay with it. Conscience trumped
everything.

Didn’t your conscience trouble
you about performing abortions?

Not for a long time, I’m sorry to
say.

I did not understand that one has to
seek the truth and want to seek the
truth in Scripture and in the Catechism. You have to do a fact and background
check of your various choices. So when I was planning to perform an abortion, I
should have asked: “Is a human life present? What does the Catholic Church have
to say about it?” If I wasn’t sure, then I should have prayerfully reflected on
the matter, including possibly talking to friends and people whom I knew and
respected. But if at every one of those points one hears dissent or an
alternative to what is actually being taught by the teaching Church, one’s
conscience becomes tainted. Certainly mine was. I felt that if I were helping
women — and thought I was — anything I did toward that end, as I now realize I
misperceived it, was okay.

What changed your thinking?

My experience.

In my clinic I saw nothing but
medical problems and personal unhappiness caused by widespread, nonmarital
sexual activity and broken, sick relationships. I thought all religions were
pretty equal at that time and started attending an Assembly of God church that
supported a local pregnancy center. I watched people pray and tell others that
it is much healthier to be chaste, deferring sexual relationships until there
is permanence and exclusivity, and a total gift of self.

It was in the late 1980s, and
suddenly lots of good things were happening. Theology of the Body and
the new Catechismwere published. Many
really good apologists — Scott Hahn is an example — began giving Catholics a
clearer, a more personal and disseminated truthful teaching of
the faith.

Is that when you visited the
Shrine of Our Lady of Guadalupe in Mexico City?

Yes. I went to help out a priest
friend and also visited the shrine, approaching it as a sociological study: I
knew that Guadalupe was central to the experience of the Mexican people. I was
certainly not prepared for — or expecting — what happened to me.

Describe that experience.

While quietly sitting in the
basilica, taking it all in, I heard a clear, distinctive female voice ask: “Why
are you hurting me?”

How did you react?

I looked around to see who was
speaking. Had I stepped on a woman’s foot? Or bumped into a woman and hurt her
somehow? But there was no woman around, and no English-speaking person, either.

Over time I came to understand whom
I was hurting — and how and why. The how? My work dispensing contraceptives,
performing sterilizations, supporting in vitro, and doing abortions. Women and
embryos were objects to be manipulated, not welcomed as persons. The who? The
mystical body of Christ. The why? My terrible formation.

You have said that you’ve drawn
some important lessons from your poor formation experience.

Yes! Thanks to that experience I
understand to the depths of my being why we must fight FOCA — the so-called
Freedom of Choice Act, which is an oxymoron. There is no freedom; there is no
choice. It is designed to coerce medical professionals to turn their backs on
their faith and their consciences in order to provide a service that it, the
government, deems appropriate.

How should we fight this?

In three ways. First, we must storm
heaven with prayers and fasting — really storm it along with reading and
studying Scripture, which, incidentally, helps to form our consciences properly.
Each of us must pray to learn what we are supposed to do in our individual,
particular circumstances and use the wisdom of the Catholic Church.

Next, I believe that the tried and
true works. We must each work one on one with someone in our midst to help
change his or her heart. Pick a friend, family member, someone in the
neighborhood — whomever. It has to be a discipleship of love, gentleness and truth
one on one the same way that the early Church moved beyond the Upper Room with
only 12 people.

Finally, we must support two areas:
pro-life legislators and pro-life medical people — doctors, pharmacists, nurses
— who integrate their faith into their practices. If these people disappear, then
the government knows that it has more influence
over the members of the Catholic Church than our bishops have.

The renewal of health care involves
more than universal coverage and lower cost; it needs a return to the vow to
promote the dignity of the human person, which we have lost. Each of us
in the medical field must not leave our faith at the front door of our
practice. Authentic Catholic health care that practices excellent
medicine, while seeing the underserved and following the wisdom of the magisterium
of the Church, is not only the answer to the crisis in health care — but is the
answer to the disgust and pessimism and cynicism of providers and
patients and is, ultimately, how we become holy.

Nona
Aguilar writes

from New York City.

INFORMATION For more
information, visit TepeyacFamilyCenter.com and DivineMercyCare.org